The Social State, Complete

They are the same as us now, but nobody told her. She had to figure it out for herself. At first she second-guessed herself. How could those machines, those things, be the same? Before it had been so clear: the rules, the enemy… everything. But now that she knew, she felt like the rug had been pulled out from underneath her, as if anything could change at a moment’s notice. In fact, just last week, a childhood friend of hers was dragged in for questioning. How could the idiots at the bureau think that he is one of them?

Even worse, she felt like she was the only one worrying. Everyone else seemed so damned indifferent. Of course people need to get on with their lives. But, with those things in our midst, threatening our very way of life, why were people acting carefree? That is surely what confused her the most: that once something carried in the opinion polls it was made into policy; even something as treasonous as embracing those putrid things.

With this, she thought as she looked at her hands, I will surely cross the line. If there even are lines anymore. People need to understand the real cost of their petty little guarantees. The wars waged in the name of a house, a job, and three meals a day.

But just then she heard a loud knock on her door…

Read Full Post »

Escaping the Social State

Despite their similarities, The Welfare State and the Socialist State fostered different zone of escape. Biopower and The Spectacle may have provided both States the mineralized skeleton of industrial market society, but social divergence eventually gave rise to significant anatomical differences. In example, the dull distinction between alleged Soviet opacity and Republican transparency is worthless unless we note that the organic membrane of each utilized contrasting modes of communication and selection; for the Iron Curtain was not a brutal veil cloaking modernist publicity but the hardening of the organic membrane between two cellular clusters of Social States. A better diagnosis is found in the differences between George Orwell’s 1984, which depicts a totalized Socialist State, and Huxley’s Brave New World, which depicts a totalized Welfare State:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us. (Amusing vii – viii)

Despite drift in the organic expression the three aspects of the Social State, the most important aspect of Cold War isolation, however, is the politically decisive forms of corporeal escape birthed by each.

Read Full Post »

The Social State / The Welfare State and The Socialist State

While the refracting expanse of The Social does not eliminate conflict, the social conflict it engenders looks nothing like the protracted civil wars of other States. Simply: social conflict floats. Because it replaces the law with norms, The Social exercises control through a patchwork system of guidelines that float and change as they interact. Other States rely on standards set by the law to which the issues of the day are pegged. (This is how religion must be practice, those are the actions of a criminal.) But without standards, which stick reference points in the swirling uncertainty of change, free-floating norms are used to manage conflicts against and through one another rather than on their own. Out at sea and unpunctuated by coordinates, this expanding block of norms is a mobile mass of intersecting concerns, none considered valuable in their own right. This unmooring demonstrates the shifting role of a State invested in The Social. Without the law, the Social State employs a positive form of power. Norms reign, not by introducing the lost concept of the normal, but by ensuring that everything under the gaze of The Spectacle becomes normalized. Normalization does not care if you are good or bad, normal or abnormal, rather, it only cares what is possible and impossible. Conflict, while still at times a liability, is then fashioned into a tool of governance that creates as well as destroys. And, instead of preserving fundamental interests such as rights by quelling internal conflicts, this State proves its worth by winning an expanding set of social interests (LoD 71).

Norms help feed the Social State’s truly global aspirations. Even though The Social is an oddly shaped net that catches an even stranger set of problems, it dreams of being a continuous fabric that covers the earth. Therefore, despite its sundry appearance, the Social State undertakes a global program of integration and regulation, as if pretending that nothing escapes its grasp. The unrelenting advance of the Nazi death state is perhaps the easiest image to conjure of the Social State’s global pretensions. Yet the distinctive feature of the Social State is not the unification of politics, but the socialization of production (LoD 28-30). The total mobilization of the Nazi state was for expansionist war, while Social States undertake total mobilizations for economic development  (264). The outcome of this total mobilization is socialization of the State is the indistinction between the state and society rather than a society still driven by the State, as in the Modern State. Therefore, instead of the Nazi State, it is two other twentieth century States that therefore serve as the paradigmatic examples of the Social State: the Welfare State and the Socialist State.

Read Full Post »

Ghost Stories & Nightmares Published

Please check out this wonderful new publication, Three Word Chant, by the folks at Giles Corey Press.

If you like what you see, please consider donating some startup funds to get the print version of their summer catalogue off the ground.

Read Full Post »

The Invention of the Social State

They are the same as us now, but nobody told her. She had to figure it out for herself. At first she second-guessed herself. How could those machines, those things, be the same? Before it had been so clear: the rules, the enemy… everything. But now that she knew, she felt like the rug had been pulled out from underneath her, as if anything could change at a moment’s notice. In fact, just last week, a childhood friend of hers was dragged in for questioning. How could the idiots at the bureau think that he is one of them?

Even worse, she felt like she was the only one worrying. Everyone else seemed so damned indifferent. Of course people need to get on with their lives. But, with those things in our midst, threatening our very way of life, why were people acting carefree? That is surely what confused her the most: that once something carried in the opinion polls it was made into policy; even something as treasonous as embracing those putrid things.

With this, she thought as she looked at her hands, I will surely cross the line. If there even are lines anymore. People need to understand the real cost of their petty little guarnatees. The wars waged in the name of a house, a job, and three meals a day.

But just then she heard an loud knock on her door…

In the Modern State, the two poles of sovereignty work together to create an elegant geometry of forces. In the Social State, they create an interface that grafts otherwise unrelated elements together into an organic whole.

Read Full Post »

Modern State, complete

The machine emitted strange buzzing, whirring, and clicking sounds. The noises unsettled casual observers, but to the technician, it made beautiful music. She had listened to its movements so many times that she did not have to look at the monitor to pick out the slow set of clicks that marked the beginning of each cycle. Tck… Tck… Tck… Tck…

The machines had been a triumph over the archaic technology that came before it. It took the dreams of stargazers and a few steady hands to crank out the first prototypes. Even the wildly imperfect geometry of the early models still hypnotized onlookers.

She was charged with maintaining a machine from a newer line. The introduction of this version of the machines had ushered in a new era. In her land, authorities were crushed under the feet of rebelling peasants. As nobles bickered with the monarchy, a new class claiming to “represent the people” had seized power. But instead of quelling the waters, wars became more bloody. And there are still dissident factions trying to destroy the machines through sabotage or even cruder methods.

It is her task to keep the machine running. The rules are clear. Polarize the field. Alternate poles. Keep everything in orbit. She had been trained in basic geometric correction, which usually entailed resetting the aperture but required redacting elements. While no one told her how to control for the creeping tide of noise, she had come up with some makeshift bypasses. But if a longterm solution was eluding her, her fellow technicians were probably in just as much trouble…

Read Full Post »

Modern State: Counter-Conducts & Barbarian Insurgency

A number of mechanisms prevent the Modern State form accomplishing full totalization of the forces that surround it. From within the Modern State, there there paths of resistance always available by virtue of the mechanisms that keep it operating. The first internal resistance is revolutionary eschatology. The plodding history that underwrites the Modern State is short-circuited by the notion that one is living in the “end times.” Such a disruption dreams of the end of politics, the withering of the State, and a perpetual peace. This approach produces resistance by opposing the State with civil society. (STP 453). The second internal resistance is the right to revolution. While the Modern State does away with demanding allegiance, it requires obedience to the law. But those rules of obedience are occasionally broken. To change the law, some rise up and break the law. This approach produces resistance by opposing the State with the population (453-4). And the third internal resistance is partisan knowledge. The Police and Publicity of the Modern State act as if they hold the truth of what is happening, and what must be done. But some come to feel that every nation within the phenomenal republic of interests possesses their own truth and are entitled to their own knowledge. This approach produces resistance by opposing the State with nations (454). The intertwining of each of these three forms of resistance is incorporated into the Modern State even as they oppose the State, and therefore constitute its genetic makeup. Opposition to any particular Modern State through these mechanisms therefore ends with the incorporation of another. But the Modern State is not monolithic, rather, its escape routes are simply found elsewhere.

Decisive disruptions to the expansive geometry of the Modern State come from the outside.

Read Full Post »

The Modern State: Spatialization and Systematization

Spatialization is the third operation of the Modern State. Spatialization is the result of the Modern State breaking through the Absolute State’s totalizing despotism. Once separated from the circular logic of omnipresent authority, the Modern State is forced into a sober realization: sovereign power is only one force among many other possible forces. Given the pluralization of force, the Modern State responds by calculating power as a matter of physics. To produce this political physics, force is first materialized by slowing down the forces within its control. Land is appraised, people counted, commodities tracked, and conduct evaluated. From this ecology of forces, the Modern State slowly introduces linear time and a discretization of space to mark out discrete blocks of space-time that serve as the architecture for its power. Like a giant relief sculpture, the Modern States is a material form carved out of a single block to reveal what lies beneath. The Modern State begins from a territorial mass, framed from the earth, from which the sculpture will be formed. To stabilize its form and find the shape imagined to already exist inside, the Modern State first eliminates excessive forces through subtraction. (Land is partitioned, deviants locked up, black markets shut down.) Next, to bring the matter to life, it sets certain forces within that territory back in motion through manipulation. (The fields are seeded, goods made, and currency exchanged.) Next, to enhance, supplement, and cover up imperfections, it introduces institutions that intervene within forces through addition. (Emptied monasteries are made into factories, indigents put to work, and the army professionalized.) And lastly, to transact between the still porous inside and the world outside it, it enables exchange through substitution. (Regions annexed, skilled workers imported, and foodstuffs sold.)

Read Full Post »